Much has happened since the original blurbage, but looking back it doesn't seem like much more than a couple of weeks ago, really. Two weeks, two years, whatever. Keeping up with time isn't one of my strong points.

I'm now project lead for GOVIA, though it's going through a rebirthing process. I was also elected to the Board of Directors of the Open Source Education Foundation (OSEF), the umbrella organization that keeps GOVIA out of the rain. Furthermore, I was condemned to Secretary-hood of the Board. Big fun.

Help out here and there on a new streaming audio project called FreeStream, which had a successful launch on Halloween, streaming a live show in Arizona to roughly a dozen other listeners scattered all over.

Projects

Recent blog entries by mattr

Man, hasn't quite been a year since my last diary entry here... Bummer.

Interesting though. I'm really glad I've kept a few notes here over the past couple of years. I just read over old entries, and it's somewhat mind-boggling.

Rather than babble fresh this evening, I'll paste something from another blog entry I put at openstreams.net a couple of weeks ago:

"
When it comes to being a 'developer', I've always found the label difficult to apply to myself (due to my own narrow thinking). It was rather tongue-in-cheek if I ever said I was an open source developer. I had geek roots, did some BASIC hacking back in the day, but I fell from grace into the insulation of Macs, used exclusively in my college communications department, and then in the art department where I first worked after school. Upon returning to the geek fold (after seeing how wretched Windows was a few years later), I tried to pick up as much as I could as fast I could...I think I still am. But I'm definitely not a 'coder' or a 'programmer.'

No, now 'developer' actually makes perfect sense. There's a lot more than code involved. Specifically, with respect to streaming, 'developers' simply need to be able to see where we can go with this, to develop the negative into a nice print we can hang on the wall. Creating content, becoming a producer (as opposed to swallowing whatever the mainstream consumer media is pushing), is development. Telling your friends about streaming radio -- that they can even do a show -- is development. My babbling here, believe it or not, may even be development. The potential is huge, and the wins in terms of community and communication could blow some minds. Got vision?
"

Ooo, but how about a whole year between entries... and still remembering my password, taboot.

A year makes for a lot of change. A new home, new projects even with old projects on back burners... watching projects splinter and decay and splinter some more. (Ok, one project, anyway...)

These days I'm more into NetBSD in general than anything else. Working with FreeStream to some extent, mostly a lurky kind of say something on occasion kind of extent, but among our goals are making it easy for anyone to stream from any OS... So I've been fooling with icecast and liveice and ices and... other stuff that won't quite work. Streaming music from home to work and such...

With that, I also happen to have a couple of Macs running OS 8.6 and 9.2, respectively... Streaming may be a challenge there as well. Audion looked nifty (though not free), but it only works with shoutcast servers or something like that. Wouldn't work with icecast on my NetBSD box... I know that.

Been a fairly down period for me though. I wrapped up what was needed first for the GOVIA queue around the first of the month. It's got issues, but it can at least accept submissions again and allows for revision of metadata and commenting. Since then, much to Barbicane's dismay, I've been somewhat less than motivated. A combination of things, I think... On one hand, I'm working on code and assorted other hacks more and more at work, leaving me a little less enthused about spending my nights at the keyboard too. In addition, a cloud of depression has settled since the initial shock and emotional turmoil of having my wife leave... Kinda leaves me sitting at home half the time staring off into space. I've never been less productive.

Even went so far last weekend as to go buy my first ever video game console, a PSOne, and Final Fantasy VII (watched my roommates play it while still in school, but never saw them finish...). Some mind-numbing, time-wasting entertainment is what I was after, and it definitely does the trick.

Still, there are good days and there are bad days... What remains to be done with the GOVIA queue is sketched out on paper. I'm looking into getting a handle on CVS just to help me keep up with things... Getting to be too much trouble to eyeball what's changed between three or four different machines with files scattered here, there, everywhere.

A bright spot over this period has been WOPN, streaming radio project of freenode (formerly Open Projects Network). My real interest in school was communication theory, so it's fascinating for me to simply observe the evolution of media.... I'm watching things happen now that I wrote about in my senior thesis four years ago. And not to give Barbicane a big head, but he's had some really great shows, the first 'talk radio' segments of WOPN, so to speak. Keeps things interesting, and of course, lively with the 'voices in his head' (folks in #wopn interacting in lagged real time with the 'ogg-jay').

I knew I'd have to break a few things night before last when I realized the database schema I had going was making message/comment threading more difficult than it needed to be. I didn't necessarily realize how much I was breaking everything, but that's to be expected from the sloppy code of an amateur attempting to learn everything at once... ;)

At any rate, things are nearly patched up again for the queue system to return to functionality. Still have a few things yet to implement, but it should be looking good by the end of the week.

While it's a bummer sometimes to suddenly see how clueless I am (!), you can't beat this kind of hands-on education, one that will lead to something worthwhile and beneficial to many (we hope!) rather than just another expensive piece of paper.

And now, though I didn't quite make it to bed last night/this morning, it's just about time to go to work... Whee!

Ever since the day that staff at the 9to5 were trained on using the new 'weekly activity report' (aka WAR, of all things, which is funny, all things considered*), Fridays have had me kinda nervous. The system works fine all week, but Friday means I have to hold my breath and cross my fingers. I have a sandbox I test in first, but I still have to hold my breath when changes 'go live.' Whipped up a bash script this morning to diff the live and sandbox code, which gave me a little more confidence that I'd covered all of my bases.

Heh, last week, I neglected to change a cron job to affect the live WAR. A minor thing, really, but a little detail that got lost. I was glad I was holding my breath with crossed fingers nearby, as it was no problem to uncross and breathe long enough to run the script manually; but more significantly, I did have to be nearby, watching and waiting for the details that turn into bugs.

This week, however, my parents have come up to visit. I needed (really needed) to leave work early to clean up the house a bit. This is their first time up since I've lived here, and it's been in typical disarray. Really, I just had to pick up all of the Coke cans sitting everywhere and hide them in the recycling bag so they wouldn't get overly concerned about the amount of Coke I drink. ;) Whatever the reason, it meant I couldn't babysit the WAR this afternoon. As I said the script to diff everything helped, but currently lacking a way into the machine from home, I was still a bit nervous. I set up a couple of cron jobs to email me at home after certain things had happened, crossed my fingers, held my breath, and went home.

I have extraordinary lung capacity.

I was already online when I got home, thanks to a cron job on that machine that brings up ppp0, usually just to check in with me. And before long, the first email had arrived... a scheduled action (the one I goofed up last week) had occurred on schedule. But the next email would be 1.75 hours away... So I cleaned up the house.

Finally, the second email arrived and I could breathe with uncrossed fingers in a clean(er) house... From what I can tell based on those two emails, things went well this afternoon. Any number of things could have fouled things up and prevented the second message from being sent, but apparently they didn't.

I took a nap and went to meet my parents at their hotel later, got some dinner, hung out with them, did some open source advocacy :), highlighted SchoolForge and the absurdity of wasting ludicrous amounts of money on software licensing in our schools when open source software, the dialogs it can inspire, and the creativity it can channel is an education unto itself. It draws together what education should involve:

logic, in the form of code or simply 'grokking' how a computer works and can be used

history, particularly as it applies to our concepts of free and freedom

economics, as they observe a new global economy struggling to understand itself

other things, which I can't think of at 3am after a night with only two hours of sleep and a 45-minute afternoon nap

I didn't have a list for my parents, just rambled a bit. After I told them the good news about the WAR standing on its own two feet (so to speak, and only somewhat (it would fall down on Monday if I didn't come in to catch it)), they asked a question I hadn't even considered. "Have you ever had any training in this?" A simple question, but it made me think. It's a symptom of a mindset, one I've observed in others also, a line of thinking that dictates courses of study, some sort of more or less meaningless certification... But I don't think we're meant so much to be trained (beyond a certain point perhaps...) as we are meant to guided in discovering and exploring what makes us tick.

When we begin to stumble upon that treasure trove, passion takes over and we develop a hunger for that growth and development of who we are, a hunger that naturally extends into our surroundings and makes us want to help out, do some good.

"...
I was eating dinner at the table with people from the music industry.
They asked me if I liked it in "The City." I said I liked it better in the country.
The label representative asked me what about it most appealed to me.
"I love to listen to the yellowhammer singing 'a little bit of bread and no cheese'."

Then I commenced to do a tap dance on eggplant Parmesan before their eyes.
Guided by voices, whole bag of tricks. Raised by Druids and Horses.

(Then I told them):

"Never underestimate the power of Love. You dig my new horseshoes?
Never underestimate the power of Love."

"Come here quickly he's lost his mind!"

"Frightened? Well I'm not surprised, you've never seen the likes of me.
Check it, I want a big fat advance and my alfalfa free!"

"Come here quickly he's lost his mind!"

The manager removed me from the restaurant. A crowd got to gathering around.
I said, "You can throw a man out on his ear, but you can't keep a good horse down!"Mounted police sprung to action. Never cut me any bit of slack.
But I wasn't going anywhere 'til they got off my brother's back.
"Clutch, Raised by Horses